Software Wars gets updated – barely – by the end of the year, technically fulfilling my promise of “two or three updates per year.”

I’ll let the changes mostly speak for themselves, but I wanted to bring up just a couple things…

Of the many (dozens!) comments I got over the summer when the site got slashdotted, the most common was a request for some of representation of the database conflict, which I have added.

A close second was a request for a showing of the console front (XBox, PS2/3, GameCube/Wii). I struggled with this but eventually decided that, while Microsoft has a major stake in that conflict, it is most likely a different theater of conflict (to extend the “war” metaphor) and the FOSS movement isn’t heavily involved in that theater. I think a “Console Wars” map could cover that, but I have no interest in making one.

Beyond consoles and databases, the comments and requests had a really wide spread. I included a few (like the Office conflict getting its own battle lines) and didn’t include others.

It’s not because I didn’t want to – I just don’t have enough space. I wanted to keep the image within 1024x768 in dimensions and the file size to less than 100k. Within those parameters, there’s only so much I can squeeze in before the text is too small and there’s just too many arrows.

Anyway, I enjoyed the Holidays and hope you did, too. Have a happy new year and here’s hoping FOSS does well in 2007. toast